The Dark-Thirty
Page 5
Blindly racing outside, Esau prayed it wouldn’t be too late. He fumbled in the darkness for the keys that were always in the ignition, then panicked. They weren’t there. No time to waste looking. He hot-wired the truck and roared up the drive and onto the country road.
The psychic bombardment continued, clearer than it had ever been before. He saw puffs of oily smoke escape from the heater. Down the hall his mother and Charity Rose slept soundly in the front bedroom. The boys were in the back room. How he wanted to be there to pick them up and carry them to safety.
“Charity Rose!” he called out with his mind. “Wake up, honey. Get the children and Ma. Get out of that house. Now!”
Esau pushed down on the accelerator as he passed the five-mile marker. The truck swerved to miss an oncoming car. “Charity Rose, wake up! Get out of that house! Get out of that house!” he called again and again.
When the oil heater exploded, Esau saw it. The mental flash blinded him and he lost control of the truck. It skidded off the road and crashed into a ditch. Although he was unconscious only a few minutes, he felt as if he’d been out for hours.
Pulling himself from the wreckage, Esau screamed. He’d cut his leg in the accident and the gash was spouting blood. He ripped a sleeve out of his shirt and tied it around the wound. The pain was severe, but he ignored it and stumbled toward the orange glow on the horizon. He heard sirens in the distance and saw flashing lights.
When Esau turned down Carpenter Street, he saw volunteer fire fighters with hoses doing what they could to contain the fire.
Esau stumbled onto the scene like a miscued actor. Turning in confusion, he ran toward the flaming house. The heat and smoke choked him and his leg hurt, but still he kept running.
“Daddy! Daddy! Over here!” his children screamed. The smoke billowed out of the broken windows. Esau tried to run, but someone was holding him back—one of the firemen. Strengthened by a burst of adrenaline, he wrestled himself free and continued to charge.
“No! No! No!” he heard Charity Rose yell.
A wall of flames towered in front of him. The heat was intense. Suddenly he felt himself being violently pushed, jerked, and slammed against the ground, rolling and tumbling like a rag doll. He collapsed in anguish.
When Esau came around, it was just as he’d seen in the vision; he was cold and shivering, coughing, and sore. But he was surrounded by his family Charity Rose had covered him with a warm, dry blanket.
“Sorry I had to turn the hose on you, Esau,” said one of the firemen. “That was the only way to stop you from going inside.”
“I thought my family was—”
“We were over here, Daddy,” one of his sons said. “Didn’t you hear us calling?”
“The sight proved to be a blessing to us,” Amanda comforted him. “We’re safe. We’re safe. You saved us.”
“Yes, we’re okay,” Charity Rose said, hugging Esau. “We got out before the explosion. I heard you.”
The Woman in the Snow
The year-long Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955–56 was a pivotal event in the American civil rights movement. Blacks refused to ride the buses until their demand of fair and equal treatment for all fare-paying passengers was met. Today the right to sit anywhere on a public bus may seem a small victory over racism and discrimination. But that single issue changed the lives of African Americans everywhere. After the successful boycott in Montgomery, blacks in other cities challenged bus companies, demanding not only the right to sit wherever they chose but also employment opportunities for black bus drivers. Many cities had their own “bus” stories. Some are in history books, but this story is best enjoyed by the fireplace on the night of the first snowfall.
Grady Bishop had just been hired as a driver for Metro Bus Service. When he put on the gray uniform and boarded his bus, nothing mattered, not his obesity, not his poor education, not growing up the eleventh child of the town drunk. Driving gave him power. And power mattered.
One cold November afternoon Grady clocked in for the three-to-eleven shift. “You’ve got Hall tonight,” Billy, the route manager, said matter-of-factly.
“The Blackbird Express.” Grady didn’t care who knew about his nickname for the route. “Not again.” He turned around, slapping his hat against his leg.
“Try the Hall Street Express,” Billy corrected Grady, then hurried on, cutting their conversation short. “Snow’s predicted. Try to keep on schedule, but if it gets too bad out there, forget it. Come on in.”
Grady popped a fresh stick of gum in his mouth. “You’re the boss. But tell me. How am I s’posed to stay on schedule? What do those people care about time?”
Most Metro drivers didn’t like the Hall Street assignment in the best weather, because the road twisted and turned back on itself like a retreating snake. When slick with ice and snow, it was even more hazardous. But Grady had his own reason for hating the route. The Hall Street Express serviced black domestics who rode out to the fashionable west end in the mornings and back down to the lower east side in the evenings.
“You know I can’t stand being a chauffeur for a bunch of colored maids and cooks,” he groused.
“Take it or leave it,” Billy said, walking away in disgust.
Grady started to say something but thought better of it. He was still on probation, lucky even to have a job, especially during such hard times.
Snow had already begun to fall when Grady pulled out of the garage at 3:01. It fell steadily all afternoon, creating a frosted wonderland on the manicured lawns that lined West Hall. But by nightfall the winding, twisting, and bending street was a driver’s nightmare.
The temperature plummeted, too, adding a new challenge to the mounting snow. “Hurry up! Hurry up! I can’t wait all day,” Grady snapped at the boarding passengers. “Get to the back of the bus,” he hustled them on impatiently “You people know the rules.”
The regulars recognized Grady, but except for a few muffled groans they paid their fares and rode in sullen silence out to the east side loop.
“Auntie! Now, just why are you taking your own good time getting off this bus?” Grady grumbled at the last passenger.
The woman struggled down the wet, slippery steps. At the bottom she looked over her shoulder. Her dark face held no clue of any emotion. “Auntie? Did you really call me Auntie?” she said, laughing sarcastically. “Well, well, well! I never knew my brother had a white son.” And she hurried away, chuckling.
Grady’s face flushed with surprise and anger. He shouted out the door, “Don’t get uppity with me! Y’all know Auntie is what we call all you old colored women.” Furious, he slammed the door against the bitter cold. He shook his head in disgust. “It’s a waste of time trying to be nice,” he told himself.
But one look out the window made Grady refocus his attention to a more immediate problem. The weather had worsened. He checked his watch. It was a little past nine. Remarkably, he was still on schedule, but that didn’t matter. He had decided to close down the route and take the bus in.
That’s when his headlights picked up the figure of a woman running in the snow, without a hat, gloves, or boots. Although she’d pulled a shawl over the lightweight jacket and flimsy dress she was wearing, her clothing offered very little protection against the elements. As she pressed forward against the driving snow and wind, Grady saw that the woman was very young, no more than twenty. And she was clutching something close to her body. What was it? Then Grady saw the baby, a small bundle wrapped in a faded pink blanket.
“These people,” Grady sighed, opening the door. The woman stumbled up the steps, escaping the wind that mercilessly ripped at her petite frame.
“Look here. I’ve closed down the route. I’m taking the bus in.”
In big gulping sobs the woman laid her story before him. “I need help, please. My husband’s gone to Memphis looking for work. Our baby’s sick, real sick. She needs to get to the hospital. I know she’ll die if I don’t get help.”
“Well, I got to go by the hospital on the way back to the garage. You can ride that far.” Grady nodded for her to pay. The woman looked at the floor. “Well? Pay up and get on to the back of the bus so I can get out of here.”
“I—I don’t have the fare,” she said, quickly adding, “but if you let me ride, I promise to bring it to you in the morning.”
“Give an inch, y’all want a mile. You know the rules. No money, no ride!”
“Oh, please!” the young woman cried. “Feel her little head. It’s so hot.” She held out the baby to him. Grady recoiled.
Desperately the woman looked for something to bargain with. “Here,” she said, taking off her wedding ring. “Take this. It’s gold. But please don’t make me get off this bus.”
He opened the door. The winds howled savagely. “Please,” the woman begged.
“Go on home, now. You young gals get hysterical over a little fever. Nothing. It’ll be fine in the morning.” As he shut the door the last sounds he heard were the mother’s sobs, the baby’s wail, and the moaning wind.
Grady dismissed the incident until the next morning, when he read that it had been a record snowfall. His eyes were drawn to a small article about a colored woman and child found frozen to death on Hall Street. No one seemed to know where the woman was going or why. No one but Grady.
“That gal should have done like I told her and gone on home,” he said, turning to the comics.
It was exactly one year later, on the anniversary of the record snowstorm, that Grady was assigned the Hall Street Express again. Just as before, a storm heaped several inches of snow onto the city in a matter of hours, making driving extremely hazardous.
By nightfall Grady decided to close the route. But just as he was making the turnaround at the east side loop, his headlight picked up a woman running in the snow—the same woman he’d seen the previous year. Death hadn’t altered her desperation. Still holding on to the blanketed baby, the small-framed woman pathetically struggled to reach the bus.
Grady closed his eyes but couldn’t keep them shut. She was still coming, but from where? The answer was too horrible to consider, so he chose to let his mind find a more reasonable explanation. From some dark corner of his childhood he heard his father’s voice, slurred by alcohol, mocking him. It ain’t the same woman, dummy. You know how they all look alike!
Grady remembered his father with bitterness and swore at the thought of him. This was the same woman, Grady argued with his father’s memory, taking no comfort in being right. Grady watched the woman’s movements breathlessly as she stepped out of the headlight beam and approached the door. She stood outside the door waiting … waiting.
The gray coldness of Fear slipped into the driver’s seat. Grady sucked air into his lungs in big gulps, feeling out of control. Fear moved his foot to the gas pedal, careening the bus out into oncoming traffic. Headlights. A truck. Fear made Grady hit the brakes. The back of the bus went into a sliding spin, slamming into a tree. Grady’s stomach crushed against the steering wheel, rupturing his liver and spleen. You’ve really done it now, lunkhead. As he drifted into the final darkness he heard a woman’s sobs, a baby wailing—or was it just the wind?
Twenty-five years later, Ray Hammond, a war hero with two years of college, became the first black driver Metro hired. A lot of things had happened during those two and a half decades to pave the way for Ray’s new job. The military had integrated its forces during the Korean War. In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated schools were unequal. And one by one, unfair laws were being challenged by civil rights groups all over the South. Ray had watched the Montgomery bus boycott with interest, especially the boycott’s leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ray soon found out that progress on the day-to-day level can be painfully slow. Ray was given the Hall Street Express.
“The white drivers call my route the Blackbird Express,” Ray told his wife. “I’m the first driver to be given that route as a permanent assignment. The others wouldn’t take it.”
“What more did you expect?” his wife answered, tying his bow tie. “Just do your best so it’ll be easier for the ones who come behind you.”
In November, Ray worked the three-to-eleven shift. “Snow’s predicted,” the route manager barked one afternoon. “Close it down if it gets bad out there, Ray.”
The last shift on the Hall Street Express.
Since he was a boy, Ray had heard the story of the haunting of that bus route. Every first snowfall passengers and drivers testified that they’d seen the ghost of Eula Mae Daniels clutching her baby as she ran through the snow.
“Good luck with Eula Mae tonight,” one of the drivers said, snickering.
“I didn’t know white folk believed in haints,” Ray shot back.
But parked at the east side loop, staring into the swirling snow mixed with ice, Ray felt tingly, as if he were dangerously close to an electrical charge. He’d just made up his mind to close down the route and head back to the garage when he saw her. Every hair on his head stood on end.
He wished her away, but she kept coming. He tried to think, but his thoughts were jumbled and confused. He wanted to look away, but curiosity fixed his gaze on the advancing horror.
Just as the old porch stories had described her, Eula Mae Daniels was a small-framed woman frozen forever in youth. “So young,” Ray whispered. “Could be my cousin Carolyn in a few more years.” He watched as the ghost came around to the doors. She was out there, waiting in the cold. Ray heard the baby crying. “There but for the grace of God goes one of mine,” he said, compassion overruling his fear. “Nobody deserves to be left out in this weather. Ghost or not, she deserves better.” And he swung open the doors.
The woman had form but no substance. Ray could see the snow falling through her. He pushed fear aside. “Come on, honey, get out of the cold,” Ray said, waving her on board.
Eula Mae stood stony still, looking at Ray with dark, questioning eyes. The driver understood. He’d seen that look before, not from a dead woman but from plenty of his passengers. “It’s okay. I’m for real. Ray Hammond, the first Negro to drive for Metro. Come on, now, get on,” he coaxed her gently.
Eula Mae moved soundlessly up the steps. She held the infant to her body. Ray couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, not even the Christmas he’d spent in a Korean foxhole. He’d seen so much death, but never anything like this.
The ghost mother consoled her crying baby. Then with her head bowed she told her story in quick bursts of sorrow, just as she had twenty-five years earlier. “My husband is in Memphis looking for work. Our baby is sick. She’ll die if I don’t get help.”
“First off,” said Ray. “Hold your head up. You got no cause for shame.”
“I don’t have any money,” she said. “But if you let me ride, I promise to bring it to you tomorrow. I promise.”
Ray sighed deeply. “The rule book says no money, no ride. But the book doesn’t say a word about a personal loan.” He took a handful of change out of his pocket, fished around for a dime, and dropped it into the pay box. “You’re all paid up. Now, go sit yourself down while I try to get this bus back to town.”
Eula Mae started to the back of the bus.
“No you don’t,” Ray stopped her. “You don’t have to sit in the back anymore. You can sit right up front.”
The ghost woman moved to a seat closer, but still not too close up front. The baby fretted. The young mother comforted her as best she could.
They rode in silence for a while. Ray checked in the rearview mirror every now and then. She gave no reflection, but when he looked over his shoulder, she was there, all right. “Nobody will ever believe this,” he mumbled. “I don’t believe it.
“Things have gotten much better since you’ve been … away,” he said, wishing immediately that he hadn’t opened his mouth. Still he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stop talking.
“I owe this job to a little woman just about your size named Mrs. Rosa Parks.
Down in Montgomery, Alabama, one day, Mrs. Parks refused to give up a seat she’d paid for just because she was a colored woman.”
Eula Mae sat motionless. There was no way of telling if she had heard or not. Ray kept talking. “Well, they arrested her. So the colored people decided to boycott the buses. Nobody rode for over a year. Walked everywhere, formed carpools, or just didn’t go, rather than ride a bus. The man who led the boycott was named Reverend King. Smart man. We’re sure to hear more about him in the future.… You still with me?” Ray looked around. Yes, she was there. The baby had quieted. It was much warmer on the bus now.
Slowly Ray inched along the icy road, holding the bus steady, trying to keep the back wheels from racing out of control. “Where was I?” he continued. “Oh yeah, things changed after that Montgomery bus boycott. This job opened up. More changes are on the way. Get this: They got an Irish Catholic running for President. Now, what to do you think about that?”
About that time Ray pulled the bus over at Seventeenth Street. The lights at Gale Hospital sent a welcome message to those in need on such a frosty night. “This is it.”
Eula Mae raised her head. “You’re a kind man,” she said. “Thank you.”
Ray opened the door. The night air gusted up the steps and nipped at his ankles. Soundlessly, Eula Mae stepped off the bus with her baby.
“Excuse me,” Ray called politely. “About the bus fare. No need for you to make a special trip … back. Consider it a gift.”
He thought he saw Eula Mae Daniels smile as she vanished into the swirling snow, never to be seen again.
The Conjure Brother
Until recently, most rural Southern towns had a resident conjure woman who sold her knowledge of the powers of roots and herbs for donations of food or clothing. Though some people laughed at the conjure woman’s spells and potions, others swore by her ability to change luck or cure an ailment. Every now and then a conjure woman came along whose powers transcended those of the ordinary “root doctors.” There was no limit to what she could do.